I have a cool party trick. When you hear most people say that, the images that come to mind are probably some involving contortionists, beer guzzling or bad impersonations of famous people, but mine is far more mundane than all that. My party trick is that my left front tooth glows under a black light. And while it doesn't really involve any effort on my part, for whatever reason it's really entertaining to other people.
Believe it or not, the glowing tooth isn't actually a result of spectacular oral hygiene. Not that I don't have spectacular oral hygiene, but that's not the point. The point is, the tooth glows because it's not real. It's an implant.
So now you're probably thinking, "Wow. You're twenty-two years old and you've already had a tooth replaced with an implant? Your oral hygiene must suck, dude" but that's not the case at all, and how dare you insult my oral hygiene. It's actually because when I was younger, I broke the real one. In half. And here's how that happened.
I don't really remember how old I was when this happened. It's probably because the excruciating pain, mortifying embarrassment and overall traumatizing nature of the event have probably reduced certain details into a partially repressed mush, which I'd imagine is a consistency akin to scrambled eggs. What I do remember though, is that I was young and it was my church's youth group trip to the Galleria to go ice skating. Most places in the United States and definitely Canada will probably be thinking, "Big deal. Ice skating. Where's the excitement in that?" But you have to remember, I lived in South Texas on the Gulf of Mexico, or as I liked to call it, the giant humidity bubble of don't snow here. Actually, the weather hardly changed at all down there. It basically operated on three different degrees of hot. There was mostly tolerable hot for most of the year, not quite so hot for the colder months, and dear sweet baby Jesus why the hell is it so hot out here for the Summer months. In South Texas summers, you really could fry an egg on a manhole cover. We tested it. You wouldn't want to then eat that egg, of course, because it'd probably taste like seven kinds of dog piss, cigarette butts and sewage fumes, but it would definitely fry all the same. So given that the only ice we'd ever seen was either floating in a glass of water or the extremely rare occasion that a shallow puddle froze over some night in December, the concept of getting to go ice skating was extremely exciting for us.
I was confident that I could do it. My dad, who'd lived in Michigan for a time, had tried to explain to me that ice skating was difficult and I shouldn't just assume that I was gonna be perfect at it the first time I tried it, but what did he know? I bet Link could ice skate the first time he tried. And besides, I knew how to in-line skate, and roller skate. Not very well, of course, but when your only means of practice were to try and keep up with your much more athletically inclined younger brother and cousin in the aforementioned sweet baby Jesus why heat, it's enough that I knew how. We did have a skating rink, of course, but it was expensive and smelled like cigarette smoke and sweat. Also, the only times I really got to go there were the occasional school skate parties. They'd open the place up to the elementary school on some given Friday and we'd all play silly, stupid games between periods of free skate time. One of those games was a lovely relic of a time when safety and the fragility of children were viewed more as "loose guidelines." It was called "Bat Tag," and it was exactly what it sounded like. One child was given a florescent orange plastic whiffle bat and set loose on the skating floor to chase down and bludgeon their fleeing classmates while the Chicken Dance was played loudly over the building's speakers. I can see how this might have been a good idea in a more controlled environment, but when you put an entire grade or two of elementary school kids on wheels and arm one of them, it becomes Lord of the Flies rather quickly. Plus they always fed us Zebra Cakes and coke, and while that's fine for most children, I had an allergy to corn syrup that caused me to become something that required an exorcism anytime I ingested it. So given the nature of the thing, it was only natural that after a while, my parents were mysteriously too busy on every given evening that was supposed to be a skate party.
There would be no bat tag at the ice skating rink, though. Just me, some friends from church, and an experience that the bipolar south Texas weather had denied us for our entire childhoods up until that point.
When we arrived, after everyone had their wristbands and ice skates and waivers signed (should have been a big red flag right there, but whatever) we were released onto the ice. The spectacle that followed was a sight that would have probably been familiar to anyone who's ever introduced a number of new kittens to an unfamiliar house. Some of them go right on about their business, playing and exploring and zooming around at top speed, while others immediately gravitate to the nearest wall which they cling to for dear life while they look for something to hide under. It was exactly the same on the ice. Half of us took to it like nothing, and the others did their parts to hold up the walls. I was one of the adventurous ones who actually set about learning to skate, but I did end up using the walls. To stop. Because how else are you going to do that? I had always used the walls to stop before at the roller skating rink, after all. I suppose it would have behooved me to learn to stop without them, but you try learning to stop moving while somebody behind you has a bat and is trying to reach you as fast as they can. I found it was just easier to use the wall, or in the case of ice skating, do a baseball slide to see how far you could get before you lost momentum.
I skated until my heels were blistered from my ill-fitted ice skates and I was clumsily tottering around, and it wasn't really a big surprise when I slipped, fell backwards and smashed the back of my head against the ice so hard that I saw nothing but blackness and flittering stars for a while. So I decided that I needed to take a break and escorted myself off the ice. It was well enough that I did anyway, because the Zamboni was released right afterwards to clean the ice and everyone had to leave anyway. After a while, it retreated back into its little box and the ice was left with a slick wet sheen that told me it was at least twice as slippery as it had been before.
Now, I've made note before of the grasp I had on common sense as a child. And that very common sense was telling me loud and clear that I should probably not go back out on the ice anymore for a while because I already smacked the back of my head, and now it's twice as slick. But for reasons I can't explain, I did anyway. And it was fine for a while. Just business as usual, tearing larger holes into the flesh of my heels and trying to pretend it didn't hurt like hell and that I really was still having fun zipping around in circles until I smashed into a wall to stop.
And it was one of those times that I smashed into a wall that some passing skater decided to teach me how to stop. I already knew how to stop, I tried to explain. I just crashed into walls. It worked well enough. But he wanted to show me how to stop the right way, which was evidently to drag one skate behind the other to slow your momentum. So I tried it. I'm still not sure if it was a bad patch of ice I hit, or if I did it wrong, or if the possible concussion I'd given myself was throwing off my sense of balance, but for whatever the reason, I failed his stopping technique spectacularly. And landed flat on my face.
I don't actually remember hitting the ice. I just remember popping back up from the impact and doing the initial systems check to make sure that everything was still functioning the way it should be. Which went fine, until I ran my tongue along my top row of teeth, and where my front one used to be I found only a small squishy thing which tasted like excruciating pain and blood. And then I started freaking out. I screamed bloody murder and then promptly closed my mouth because it hurt like hell when the air hit the exposed nerve, and I quickly skated back over to the seating area to get off the ice. The adults who were present kept asking what had happened, and in response I spit out a mouthful of blood and dignity and proceeded to bawl my eyes out from the pain. And it was at this point that all hell broke loose among the adult leaders. One of them attempted to pacify my hysterical state by giving me a cell phone to play games on, which actually worked for a short time because I wasn't allowed to have a cell phone and never got to play games on them. But after losing at Snake for the third time, my attention for the game was replaced by the sensation of screaming exposed nerve in my mouth, and I was hysterical again.
Ultimately, I was escorted out of the area (probably both because I needed medical attention and because I was causing a massive scene which I'm sure was costing the skating rink money in customers who didn't want to destroy their own teeth) and into the church van to go home. My best friend Ben gave up the rest of his own skate time to come with me, which I was highly appreciative of not only for the company, but because he had a copy of Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons on his gameboy color which I hadn't gotten to play yet, and he let me play it on the way home. I've compared his loyalty and behavior to a golden retriever before, but however accurate it may be I was glad for it at that point. By the time we were halfway back to home, the nerve had stopped hurting quite so badly. I still don't really know if that was just something exposed nerves do, or if the pain had caused my brain to fall into sort of a state of shock in order to cope with it.
We did actually find the other half of the tooth on the ice, which is kind of amusing in and of itself, but the break was so high and so much of the nerve was exposed that there was really no way to save the tooth. As a result, the rest of the tooth was pulled and a root canal was performed (which was a traumatic story all its own) and I was landed with a nice replacement tooth, and a neat stupid party trick.
I have gone ice skating several times since then, and I haven't broken anything since. In fact, the last time I skated at the galleria I was with my (now ex) girlfriend, and the only challenge I had to face then was resisting the urge to clothesline the irritating children who insisted on skating between us while we were holding hands. Had it not been for the fact that she thought they were cute and that it probably would have been not quite socially acceptable, I might have introduced them to a game called Bat Tag...
-The Sarcastic Soul-
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